OSDC/YAPC::AU in hindsight
It's done. After a year of planning and hard work, from a volunteer committee comprised of members much more dedicated and skilled than myself, everything paid off and the conference is complete. The feedback we received has been outstanding, everyone appears to have been extremely happy with the conference. The only blight was the so-called coffee, which we'll be gladly upgrading next year. The rest of the food and drinks, on the other hand, were very good indeed. Many kudos go to Nathan Bailey and Jacinta for organising the catering.

I now hold a new and deep respect for anyone who's organised a conference. It's a lot of work, and in the final days (and the conference itself) there's little time for sleep or socialising.

Lack of sleep aside, this was way way up in the top few conferences that I've attended. We had some superb speakers, and a huge contingent of Perl programmers.

Damian was present for both introductory and closing keynotes, and as much as I keep thinking that Damian's presentation skills couldn't possibly get any better, they do. Damian played excellently to his audience, not all who were Perl programmers, and presented two lightning talks entirely in song from Gilbert and Sullivan.

Abigail and his wife were present at the conference on their honeymoon. Apparently they had seen Damian present a brief mention of OSDC and a showcase of our (very deadly) Australian fauna, and decided that it would make an excellent holiday destination.

We were lucky enough to have Nat Torkington attend, after a few moments of doubt in the early days. Nat presented a very interesting keynote on changes in book sales, and inferred conclusions for changes in the software industry. It also seemed that whenever I bumped into Nat he was giving me something -- T-shirts, books, laughter, and even drinks.

Adam Kennedy from Phase-N and prolific CPAN author, who I had bumped into on a number of common industry mailing lists, was in attendance and great value for money. He presented an excellent 'speed-dating CPAN' lightning talk, with a new module every 15 seconds. Adam was also very lucky to hear about a grant he had received for further work on Perl.

Baden Hughes from The Perl Foundation was only able to attend the last day, and presented an excellent discussion on how to both give and receive money from TPF. Unfortunately Baden was scheduled at the same time as the lightning talks, and the lightning talks proved to be wildly popular. Next year I'm sure we'll shut down the other streams during the lightning talk sessions.

Dinner had the first Perl Review, along with original artwork, go up for auction. Despite some heavy bidding I didn't walk away with it, although the winner (Kat Grant) promised that I could read it. The hilight of the auctions for me was Abigail purchasing a YAPC 19100 t-shirt identical to the one he was wearing at the time.

I've got a few days worth of photographs to put on-line. This is a mostly automated process, but involves me weeding out the ones that didn't work out or not suitable for public consumption, and writing up captions if I have the time. Some day zero photos are already online.

Unfortunately on the third day I had charged the batteries for the camera, but didn't actually bring them. Anyone who has photographs from the third day (or any day at all), please get in contact with me.

Scotty, who was conference chair, surprised the committee with a multi-tool thank-you gift each. Nat Torkington, giving away things even when I wasn't nearby, surprised the committee with offers of books and t-shirts of our choice.

After the conference there was a celebration at the local pub, cleanup, and a few survivors (myself and Jacinta included) went out for some very tasty Japanaese food.

Special Mention
One special mention should go to Daniel Pittman, who kept me sane during the conference. Clients have an uncanny knack of developing problems during conferences and holidays, and Daniel fielded an incredible number of issues including some heavy-duty destruction of websites and machines. This kept me sane, although meant that Daniel had a much less enjoyable conference than he would have otherwise.

Other Reports
If you know of another report or blog that's mentioned OSDC, I'd love for you to record it on the OSDC wiki.

OSDC, Day 1
Went to bed at about 1:30am last night. Woke at 6am today. Waking at 6am tomorrow. Exhausted, exhausted, exhausted.

Putting some photos on-line because I took so many. Most didn't work out, the camera is very poor for indoor conditions. The good camera which we were supposed to get before the conference didn't reach us, and probably won't until next week. It's free, so there's not much we can do there.

Going to bed. Must sleep.

The night before OSDC
Well, this is it. After many months of planning, OSDC (aka YAPC::AU) is finally happening, tomorrow. The committee will be starting setup at 7am, and that includes Jacinta and myself. Tomorrow will be ending after the dinner, I'll be drinking a lot of coffee tomorrow.

Today was spent doing day-before setup at the facility, putting up signs, installing computers, and testing that Frozen Bubble works on the huge overhead projectors with thumping sound systems. Perhaps I could challange Damian or Gnat to a game of Frozen Bubble as a lightning talk? Perhaps all the stress of conference organising is finally sending me fruity.

For my part, I have everything ready, except for the traditional things, like my presentation and keynote introductions. At least this is one conference where I won't need to pack a huge box of business cards -- as Perl Training Australia are sponsors, everyone will be getting a business card in their conference pack.

I've got a bunch of photos of setup and organisers (while they're still smiling!). They'll be going up when I get a a free moment with connectivity and no pressing tasks.

Scuba Gear
Big box of scuba gear arrived the other day. Getting it through customers was interesting, they wanted to know what a 'tank bhan-ger' was used for. Eventually (when I found my order sheet) I realised it was a 'tank bang-er'. After a few more difficulties (why would you want to bang your tank?) I communicated it was an underwater signalling device,

After the conference I'm looking forward to popping down to Portsea for a day or two in order to test out all the new gear. We've got some wonderfully over-engineered lights (primary filament, backup filament, backup light, and locator light), so I'm really looking forward to a night dive if we can squeeze one in.

Revision Control
Goodness, sponsoring a conference is an awful lot of work. There's brochures to print, presentation folders to make, advertisements to prepare to particular dimensons, speaking opportunities, and an awful lot of text to write for everything. On top of that add the regular conference things like your own presentations, and stir in a number of clients trying to spend their budgets before the end of the year, and you end up with a particularly busy week. There's a good chance that something can be overlooked.

As developers and writers we all know the golden rule of working together, or even just singularly. Revision control, revision control, revision control; and in my case a little coffee on the side. However during this hectic week of presentations, a mistake was made. I broke the golden rule. When submitting one of our advertisements, I submitted the wrong one.

Sure, there was a 30-minute deadline to get the advertisement to the relevant people, and sure there was a conversion process in there to get it into the preferred format, and yes this was at the end of the day with other deadlines looming. It's the perfect situation for a mistake to be made, and that's why the golden rule of revision control is all the more important.

In this particular case, I didn't know that the document had been filed into CVS. I knew that it should have been. Jacinta knew that too, and indeed had placed it into CVS into the most obvious location, and updated it to the revised version that we actually wanted to use. Everything was there, I just didn't bother to type cvs update to find out.

Wedding Anniversary, 1a
I've been married for slightly more than 13 months now. Jacinta and I celebrated our real one year anniversary on the correct day, but aside from a nice dinner and helping save the life of a drug overdose victim we didn't really do that much due to work restrictions. So we instead planned to have a second anniversary -- one month and one day after our real one.

The plan was that we would take Friday off work, spend a little time shopping for scuba equipment, and then head to the beach if the weather was good, or plan something else enjoyable if it were not. Afterwards we'd drop into a Firefox celebration happening that evening, have a nice dinner, and take advantage of a complimentary stay with breakfast that was offered to us by the hotel where we had our wedding reception a year ago. It was going to be a wonderful break from what's otherwise been an exceedingly busy and stressful time.

Unfortunately, things didn't go quite as planned. The BoM was tipping rain, so we skipped on the day at the beach. Instead we spent the entire day working on formatting papers for the OSDC proceedings. Not technically paid employment, but certainly not my idea of a romatic day together. Still, we had the evening to enjoy.